The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a longitudinal panel study that surveys a representative sample of more than 26,000 Americans over the age of 50 every two years. The study has collected information about income, work, assets, pension plans, health insurance, disability, physical health and functioning, cognitive functioning, genetic information and health care expenditures.

The CDHA assists researchers to create, document, and distribute public use microdata on health and aging for secondary analysis. Major research themes include: midlife development and aging; economics of population aging; inequalities in health and aging; international comparative studies of health and aging; and the investigation of linkages between social-demographic and biomedical research in population aging. The CDHA is one of fourteen demography centers on aging sponsored by the National Institute on Aging.

The Gateway to Global Aging Data is a platform for population survey data on aging around the world. This site offers a digital library of survey questions, a search engine for finding comparable questions across surveys, and identically defined variables for cross-country analysis. The Survey Meta Data Repository provides Health and Retirement Study metadata of family surveys. Survey Meta Data Repository primarily provides access to survey metadata so researchers can compare survey formats, types and identically defined variables. Additional resources include tools for cross-country analysis, general statistics by country and year, survey question library, and tools for comparing questions across the surveys. Datasets are in Stata format; users must register and request datasets.